


A Stranger with His Face

by MissAlise



Series: A Study in Character [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:38:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAlise/pseuds/MissAlise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marc Stilinski has always tried to be everything his son needs him to be.</p><p>(A character-study of Sheriff Stilinski from the death of his wife to the end of Season 2.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Stranger with His Face

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for stopping by! I would love for the show to go into more detail with the Stilinskis' backstories, but for now I have to be satisfied with my own take. Concrit is more than welcome, and comments/kudos are always appreciated.

Marc Stilinski watches his son watch his mother die.  He watches his son’s ten-year-old little boy fingers wrap around her hand when she looks at them both and says “Sometimes I can’t stand how much I love you two.”  He learns how to cook dinner, and separate the laundry, and prune the rose bushes in the front yard and the raspberry bushes in the back.  He learns that his son needs him to be home when he says he will, and, after he finds Stiles curled up on his mother’s side of the bed when he thought he’d be alone, he learns that his son needs him to be _gone_ when he says he will be, too.

He takes off work for parent/teacher conferences and soccer games and Stiles’ birthday.  He learns the importance of giving his son mental-health days and locking up the liquor cabinet when he finds a bottle of his whiskey underneath the twin bed fitted with cotton Spiderman sheets.  He becomes a better father and a sub-par mother and everything that Stiles has left in the entire world.  Claire had been the single best thing to ever happen to either of them, and he slowly comes to realize that he will never fill the hole she left behind, but he never stops trying.

Stiles leaves elementary school and moves onto middle, and Marc watches him pretend that everything is OK.  Stiles spends three nights a week at the McCall house, because Marc might be a father but he is also the Sheriff, and sometimes he can’t be around to make sure his son eats his greens and goes to bed before midnight.  Melissa always says it isn’t a problem--that Stiles is the sweetest kid she’s ever met, and anyone who can help release some of Scott’s boundless energy is welcome over any time--but it doesn’t take much to see that she’s lying.  At least a little.

 _Everyone_ starts lying.

Mrs. Jefferson at the grocery store gives him discounts on things that aren’t on sale, and somehow Stiles never racks up any fines at the library even though Marc knows very well that the pile of books on his bedroom floor has been there for months.  It’s the town’s way of being kind, of taking care of their Sheriff, but it feels too much like being reminded every single day of the wife and mother and love of his life who’s buried in the dirt at the edge of town.

The first year without her is the hardest twelve months of his life, and when the anniversary of her death sneaks up on them, he and Stiles don’t go to visit her grave.  They choose to go on her birthday instead, and the thought of celebrating her life instead of her death seems like the most loving, appropriate thing they can possibly do for her now.

The Hale house catches fire halfway through the second year without Claire, and if Marc thought there was anything he could do to help the two kids left behind, he would do it.  The house is in the middle of nowhere, and it takes so long for someone to notice the fire and call 911 that nothing but a burnt-out husk is left by the time the fire trucks manage to douse it.  Eleven dead, and when he looks into the youngest boy’s eyes, he sees the same empty, lonely hatred he sees every single morning when he looks in the mirror.

Laura Hale is old enough to take her and her brother away, and Marc doesn’t do anything to stop them.  Sometimes he thinks leaving Beacon Hills is the only sane choice to make, and he can’t help wondering why he doesn’t take Stiles and follow suit.

In hindsight, he figures that’s really when everything starts going to shit, but at the time is seems like just another sick accident.  The same kind of sick accident that had taken Claire’s life and the kind that hurts so much because there is no one to blame but God.

Later that year, Melissa and her husband John finally get a divorce, and even though Marc hates seeing another family ripped apart, he’s happy they do.  John is the kind of man who was never meant to be a father, and he’s never been good at pretending.  It means that Melissa starts working more and her budget gets tighter, so Stiles stops sleeping over as often.  He’s old enough now that he can be left alone, and sometimes when Marc has to work late, he comes home to find that his son has made his dinner and done the laundry and scrubbed the bathtub and he thinks that he forced his baby boy to grow up too fast.

Stiles makes it through his three years at Beacon Hills Middle School with decent grades, a handful of behavioral issues, and a new prescription for ADHD medication that Marc doesn’t have the guts to fill for three weeks.  He sits in his squad car and wonders if this would have happened had Claire still been alive.  He wonders if he hasn’t been doing the whole “single father” thing wrong the whole time and no one has bothered telling him.

He meets a woman named Jenny online and they go to dinner a couple of counties over, and she’s beautiful and funny and everything he would have looked for in a woman twenty years ago.  That night, after he goes home alone, he dreams about Claire and when he wakes up in the morning he calls Jenny and tells her it’s too soon.  It’s the truth, but it’s not a temporary one.  It’s the kind of truth that will never stop being true.

One day Marc wakes up and realizes that she’s been gone for four years.  He thinks it should be easier by now--that enough time has gone by for the wounds of her passing to have scabbed over at least a little--and to a certain extent it is and they have.  Some days he goes for hours without thinking about the way she smelled and the movies she loved and the way that her pot roast was a million times better than his will ever be.  When he does think about her, though, as he inevitably does, the pain is no less than it was the day they put her in the ground.

It’s the day of Stiles’ first lacrosse game, and even though he doesn’t play it just serves to remind Marc of all the things his wife has missed.

They find the body of a young woman in the woods, and the fact that they only find her lower half makes him want to lash out at all the evil people in the world.  When they discover that the body belongs to Laura Hale, it makes him want to curl up in his bedroom, lock the door, and never leave, because sometimes all the terrible things happen to a single person and more often than not they don’t deserve it.  Then suddenly more people are dying--a bus-driver, a janitor at the high school--and he wants to take his son away from this place and protect him, but somehow Stiles has gotten himself wrapped up in the middle of everything like he always does and thoughts of leaving turn to dust.

“Derek Hale.  Derek Hale killed the janitor, Dad.”

“Are you sure?”

He asks because he wants it to be a lie, but he silently thinks ‘ _No shit_ ’.   He’s seen what happens to those unlucky few who witness the viciousness of the world, and Derek Hale has seen more viciousness than most.  Marc is happy the boy didn’t kill his sister, but he’s not surprised he killed someone else.

The lies start soon after that.  Or maybe they started a long time ago and Marc was just too wrapped up in work to notice.  He thinks Stiles must have forgotten how close Marc used to be with Melissa, in the days when she brought them dinner because they’d been too numb to fend for themselves--it’s the only explanation why his son thinks he’ll get away with saying he’s at Scott’s house when he’s obviously not.  Marc calls Melissa every time, and every time he discovers another lie.  Stiles is seen driving out of town towards the old Hale place, and there’s nothing out there but the burnt-out husk of a murder scene and angry ghosts.

It’s obvious that Scott’s in on it, too.  It might look like nothing more than a pack of reckless teenagers from the outside, but Stiles hasn’t been reckless in a long time and Marc knows it.  The knowledge makes things so much worse, because if it’s not recklessness, it’s something much more dangerous, and the thought of losing his son to an enemy he cannot fight brings him to the edge of his strength.

Stiles steals a police vehicle and traps Jackson Whittemore in it for days, and suddenly Marc doesn’t even know him anymore.  There’s a stranger living under his roof, one with his son’s buzz-cut and his wife’s beautiful brown eyes and his own wretched stubbornness.  He loses his job, and he has nothing left to hide behind.

For such a long time, he thought that being unable to blame anything for his wife’s death was the most debilitating thing he would ever have to live with.  He was wrong.  He’s losing his son and he gets to blame himself for it, and it’s a million times worse.  If Claire were still alive, none of this would have happened.  They’d be one big happy family, and Laura Hale would never have died, and Derek wouldn’t have come back to Beacon Hills, and all Stiles would have to worry about was making first line on the lacrosse team and getting a girlfriend.

Instead, Marc had fucked up somewhere along the line.  He’d tried to be a father and a mother and everything that Stiles had left in the world and he wasn’t good enough.  He wasn’t good enough to save his wife and he wasn’t good enough to hold onto this stranger wearing his son’s face.

“I wish you’d stop lying to me, Stiles.  I wish you’d tell me what’s really going on.”

“I can’t, Dad.  I just...can’t.”

Marc gets his badge back, so he dry-cleans his uniform and goes back to work.  Maybe he can’t save his son.  Maybe he can’t save his town.  Maybe he can’t save anyone.  But he can't not try.

When Stiles goes missing and comes back to him beaten and bloody, it’s his worst nightmare come true.  The fact that he tries to blame his wounds on a couple of stupid high-school lacrosse players is the final nail in the coffin, the last lie Marc can stomach before they all come pouring back out of him and drown them both.  When it comes down to it, he knows he’s not much different than John McCall--neither of them were really meant to be fathers.  Marc’s just always been better at pretending.

He lies down in his bedroom with the lights off, and he waits for his son to sneak out.  Stiles isn’t stupid enough to ignore the fact that the Jeep sounds like some kind of howling monster in the night, and the only conclusion Marc can draw from it is that he doesn’t care.  He’s sneaking out and he doesn’t care if his father figures it out.  It’s the worst kind of lie there is: one that doesn’t even attempt to disguise itself.

It's easy enough to follow him.  He gets in the cruiser and tracks his son first to the Martin’s suburban mansion and then to some dark warehouse in the middle of the industrial section.  He sees things that are both impossibly confusing and impossibly clarifying and on top of it all just plain impossible, and when he gets home he wants Claire to be there more acutely than he’s ever wanted anything else in his entire life.

Stiles doesn’t come home that night, but Marc will wait.  He's used to waiting, and he’ll wait forever because his wife would have waited forever.  His wife, who had loved both of them more than she could stand, would have sat there and waited until her hair turned gray and her eyes clouded over and no one living remembered her name.


End file.
